Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Sufism Sufi literature Islam'

This study is a theoretical research concerning Ibn Arabi's Sufi experience and his philosophy of the "
unity of being"
(also his poetical talent). I therefore adopted the historical and analytical methodologies to analyse and reply on the questions and suggestions I have raised in this paper. Both of the methodologies reveal the actual status of the Sufism of Ibn Arabi who came with a challenging sufi doctrine. Also, in the theoretical methodology I attempt to define Sufism by giving a panoramic history of it. I have also researched Ibn Arabi's status amongst his contemporaries for example, Al-Hallaj and Ibn Al Farid, and how they influenced him as a Sufi thinker during this time.

In the analytical study I explore the poems "
Tarjuman al Ashwaq"
of Ibn Arabi, of which I have selected some poems to study analytically. Through this I discovered Ibn Arabi's Sufi inclinations and the criticisms of various literary scholars, theologians, philosophers and also sufi thinkers, both from the East and the West. In this analysis I have also focused on the artistic value of the poetry which he utilized to promote his own doctrine "
the unity of being."

There is a conceptual resonance between the rhizomatic habit in the world of plants and the perennial errancy in the (meta)physical world of man traversed by Mohammed Dib’s writing. In so far as reflective research and the practice of translation can ‘mirror’ the surface of their object, this project is a rhizomatic endeavour. It is a fragmentary journey into the desert, in search of the mysterious at’lāl, the trace of the sign, drawn and effaced and redrawn again by Mohammed Dib to reveal ephemeral truths about the self and its others. Dib’s focus migrates from early realist ‘socio-ethnographic’ novels in the 1950s to metaphysical explorations described by critics as ‘hermetic’, ‘mystical’ or ‘surreal’. The historical and the mystical, however, are two facets of the same inexorable acts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization in a precarious, often oneiric, universe. The ‘visions’ expressed in his poetics are couched in the elemental vocabularies of light and shadow, fire and water, space and duration and draw their substance from Sufi mystical scholars and poets. I posit that Dib’s nomadic contemporary writing arises from the place that lies between the sensible and the intelligible in Sufi mysticism, in a secular transposition of the Sufi Imagination: Dib neither constructs nor deconstructs. Rather, his singular style serves to hone an acutely experiential expression. Further, there is a sense in which each ouvrage is a heterotrope whereby his poetry and prose collections are inextricably embedded in each other, thus one is always in the middle of his universe. The ubiquitous entry point to this universe lies in the middle of his metaphorical desert, an aesthetic landscape stripped of idiocultural signification. Central to its lines of flight is the sign, both ephemeral and enduring, and what is enveloped in the sign is the non-signifying impact of its expression. I argue that Dib’s perennial re-assembling of ‘ces chaînes aux mailles d’acier qui sont mots’ (those chains with links of steel that are words) doesn’t so much ‘give rise to thought’ as ‘give rise to affect’.

The eleventh and twelfth centuries represent a critical formative period for institutions and practices that characterized later Islam. Sufism also emerged during the same period as a distinct mode of piety that gained widespread acceptance in the aftermath of Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century. Using early Sufi biographies produced in Khorasan during that period, this study will argue that the early Sufis were not only preoccupied with locating their own tradition within the Islamic orthodoxy but also defining the contours of what constituted acceptable Islam. The sources used are predominantly Persian Sufi biographies composed in Khorasan which form the main body of historiography of Sufism.

This thesis describes and analyzes the practice of Sufism in a contemporary setting in Ankara from the insider point of view. The research deals critically with various approaches to Sufism in the field of anthropology, and introduces the Sufi scene in Turkey. The subject of the study is a Sufi formation which eludes categories in the field of Sufism, presenting close master/disciple relationships instead of institutional structures and normativity, and avoiding dichotomies such as modern/traditional, sacred/profane or unity/multiplicity. The research focuses on the interaction between its lack of form and the content of this particular Sufi practice, on the levels of the individuals and the group, and contextualizes it within the tradition of Islam. It also analyzes the processes of change occurred in the formation and within individuals during the time with the master and after his death. Plurality, respect for individual and cultural differences, deconstruction of existing categories &ndash
such as being, religion, the self, power and hierarchy-, ambiguity, the processuality and the open-endedness of experience and signification processes are important characteristics of the formation. Participants in the ethnographic research are restricted to the educated middle-class members of the formation. The applied method of research is Multi Grounded Theory enriched with the phenomenological mode of interviewing and collaboration of the members of the formation.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the topoi found in various writings on the Indian subcontinent, which depict Muslim mystics, the Sufis, as responsible for the conversion, forced or peaceful, of non-Muslim Indians to Islam. Our analysis of various historiographical traditions produced in the Subcontinent between the eleventh and the twentieth centuries, will show that this image of Sufis qua missionaries is more the result of socio-political considerations (legitimization of imperial order; posthumous images of Sufis in the eyes of different folk audiences, etc.) than the reflection of historical reality. This thesis also examines the processes, most of them indirect, in which Sufis were involved and which on the long run led to the acculturation and to the Islamization of certain non-Muslim groups, thus opening the way for the birth and then consolidation of a Muslim identity.

Syftet med detta arbete är att undersöka vilka uttryckssätt den mystiska folkfromheten inom islam, sufismen, kan ha och om undervisning om den kan bidra till en mer allsidig bild av islam i den svenska kontexten. Med det hermeneutiska förhållningssättet som utgångspunkt har dels en läromedelsanalys och dels en fallstudie genomförts. Läromedelsanalysen behandlar i vilken omfattning och på vilket sätt sufismen presenteras i läroböcker som används i grundskolans senare år samt i gymnasiet. Fallstudien bygger på både deltagande observationer samt kvalitativa intervjuer i en sufiorden.Läromedelsanalysen visar att sufismen knappt behandlas i läroböckerna. Den bild som ges av sufismen är en historisk sufism där det religiösa utövandet inte beskrivs. Fallstudien visar att den sufism som utövas inom sufiorden är en levande sufism som inte beskrivs i undervisningen idag.Den slutsats som kan dras av undersökningen är att den levande sufismen mycket väl kan användas i ett didaktiskt syfte för att visa en mångfald inom islam.

In this paper I give biographical sketches of a thirteen century Egyptian poet, best known as al- Busiri, the original composer of Kasidatul Burdah in Arabic and the Swahili translator of the said epic best known as Sheikh Muhammad Mshela, from Shela in Lamu, Kenya. Kasidatul Burdah (The Mantle Ode) or Kasida ya Burudai, in Swahili, is the most famous qasida in the Muslim world. I transcribed this qasida from Arabic to Roman script and analysed it (wa Mutiso 1996). My intention is to show how these poets share the same world view concerning Sufism and Islamic culture in particular

In this paper I give biographical sketches of a thirteen century Egyptian poet, best known as al- Busiri, the original composer of Kasidatul Burdah in Arabic and the Swahili translator of the said epic best known as Sheikh Muhammad Mshela, from Shela in Lamu, Kenya. Kasidatul Burdah (The Mantle Ode) or Kasida ya Burudai, in Swahili, is the most famous qasida in the Muslim world. I transcribed this qasida from Arabic to Roman script and analysed it (wa Mutiso 1996). My intention is to show how these poets share the same world view concerning Sufism and Islamic culture in particular

The label ‘Muslim’ is increasingly being used to exclude migrants and non-ethnic Germans from German society. Although this process began after 2000 when Germany’s citizenship laws changed from jus sanguinis to incorporate an element of jus soli and minority subjects could no longer be ‘othered’ by their passports alone, it intensified shortly afterwards due to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (Spielhaus 2006). Specifically within the German context, the discovery that Mohamed Atta, one of the perpetrators of 9/11, had lived and studied in Hamburg, the foiled bomb plots of 2006 and 2007, and the 2011 Frankfurt Airport shooting all served to buttress this paradigmatic shift from national/ethnic difference to religious. Yet, rather than responding in kind to this identitarian entrenchment, the work of Zafer Şenocak, SAID, Feridun Zaimoglu and Navid Kermani (all minority writers of varying Muslim backgrounds) suggests new ways of thinking about community, identity and religiosity that are fluid, non-foundational and open to an undecided future, which can all be illuminated by Jean-Luc Nancy’s theories of the ‘inoperative community’ (2000 and 1991) and the deconstruction of monotheism (2008).For Nancy, the traditional understanding of community as the fusion of immanent individuals with a common identity must be resisted, as this disguises our actual ontological interrelatedness as ‘singular beings’ who are radically open to one another. This non-foundational approach regards the spacing of interconnected singular beings (their ‘being-in-common’) as the sense of the world, and rejects universalising ideologies that seek to confer sense upon the world from the outside, since these act to close down meaning and divide us up into polarised communities. In Nancy’s terms, whether these ideologies be political or religious, they are both defined by the monotheistic paradigm that operates through a separate ideal world that acts as our world’s guiding principle. This is why Nancy himself rejects the term cosmopolitanism, as its philosophical roots in the metaphysics of the Enlightenment stem from the ideal world of pure Reason. Nevertheless, just as the inoperative community can be understood as a non-foundational route to cosmopolitan solidarities, the deconstruction of monotheism too leaves space for a non-foundational religiosity that resists traditional identities and symbolism. Nancy proposes, borrowing from mysticism, a God not as ‘the “other world” [...], but the other of the world’ (2008, p. 10), that is to say, a religiosity that does not position God as the subject of the world and its organizing principle, but concerns itself instead with glimpsing the divine in the alterity in our world, which results from the very nothingness of its origins. These arguments, that I place at the forefront of post-9/11 debates surrounding cosmopolitanism and religion, can shed light on the literary writing of Şenocak, SAID, Zaimoglu and Kermani, who draw upon the immanentist tradition within Islamic mysticism in order to intimate a non-identitarian religiosity that figures in the alterity of the world and leaves open all possibilities for the future. In this regard, their fiction hints at an affective and worldly spirituality that can be found in love, sex, music and the natural world, which, whilst also serving to dispel stereotypical associations between Islam and sexual conservatism, hints at a post-monotheistic religiosity beyond identity and ideology. Thus, rather than creating a homogenous foundation through dialogue (the approach of the German state and often of interkultureller Germanistik), the non-foundational and cosmopolitan conceptualisations of the self, community and religiosity found in the writing of these authors both undermine the closed identities that are clashing violently across the globe at the start of the twenty-first century and also open up the space for us to imagine new ways of coexisting.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2006. Graduate Programme in History.
Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 331-350). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR39017

The primary focus of this dissertation is to establish the extent to which ta§awwuf, commonly referred to as Islamic Spirituality, impacted on Cape Muslim culture. The study spans the time period between the arrival of the first significant political exiles at the Cape in 1667 to the founding of the Muslim Judicial Council in 1945. To this end a short historical review of ta§awwuf as it unfolded since its inception in the Muslim world is given in order to provide the necessary background against which any study of ta§awwuf at the Cape must be measured. This, in the authorÕs opinion, has not been attempted before in local studies in any systematic way. To further augment this study, a review of the nature and character of ta§awwuf as it emerged in the geographical areas from whence the political exiles and slaves were brought to the Cape is also engaged. As part of the conclusion to this dissertation an ÒafterwordÓ is provided that briefly sketches the post-1945 theological milieu that increasingly witnessed the emergence of new anti-ta§awwuf pressures within the Muslim community.
Religious Studies and Arabic
MA (Arabic)

Ce mémoire présente une exploration décoloniale et transdisciplinaire des doctrines et pratiques de la confrérie soufie transnationale Burhaniya, dans le monde arabe et en Occident. Il traite principalement de la période s’étendant de la fondation de la confrérie en 1938 jusqu’en 2012. Pour bien contextualiser les particularités de l’émergence de cette confrérie moderne, ce mémoire présente tout d’abord son ancrage historique par l’étude de ses racines en lien avec l’histoire du soufisme en Afrique du Nord et en Asie de l’Ouest. Puis, ce mémoire offre une analyse comparative de certains des principaux contextes nationaux où s’est disséminée cette confrérie, à partir du Soudan, vers l’Égypte, la France, l’Allemagne, les États-Unis et le Canada. Suite à ses recherches, l’auteur conclut que les cheikhs de la Burhaniya ont facilité l’expansion de la confrérie en occident et ont perpétué un héritage soufi plutôt traditionnel au sein du monde moderne. Ils ont su le faire en préservant les doctrines fondamentales de leur tradition tout en adaptant leurs pratiques à divers contextes.
This thesis presents a decolonial and transdisciplinary examination of the doctrines and practices of the transnational Burhaniya Sufi order, in the Arab World and in the West. The main time period under consideration is from the foundation of the order in 1938 until 2012. In order to contextualize the particularities of this modern order’s emergence, this thesis begins by presenting its historical roots related to the history of Sufism in North Africa and West Asia. Then, the thesis offers a comparative analysis of certain national contexts in which the order was disseminated, from Sudan to Egypt, France, Germany, the United States, and Canada. The author concludes from his findings that the sheikhs of the Burhaniya have facilitated the expansion of their order in the West, and perpetuated a fairly traditional Sufi heritage in the modern world. They have done so by combining strong commitment to core doctrines and adaptability to contexts of practice.